[RFC 0/2] Do not stop with an error when mkimage fails

[Rasmus Villemoes]

On 10/11/2021 01.18, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
> On 09/11/2021 20.42, Tom Rini wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 09, 2021 at 08:21:07PM +0100, Heiko Thiery wrote:
>>> Hi Wolfgang,
>>>
> 
>>> I know this is not a perfect solution but I don't know how to get my
>>> board merged without doing this kind of workaround for the U-Boot CI.
>>
>> Unfortunately in these days of needing multiple inputs to create a
>> functional image and also needing to have CI be able to be at all
>> useful, what we do in many many many cases is yell loudly to the user
>> that the resulting file here will NOT work and why.  So yes, some "yell
>> it won't work but not return non-zero exit status" is the norm.
>>
>> I would be very much open however to some way to handle this
>> differently.  Some environment variable our tools check for and then
>> yell-but-succeed?  Some other idea?  I'm just thinking out loud here.
> 
> Yes, I believe the build system must be taught some env var (or other
> means) for opting in to this behavior. 

Oh, and it should of course only paper over missing binary blobs, not
arbitrary errors from mkimage or other tools. The easiest way to do that
is probably to create some dummy blob(s) [only when CREATE_BROKEN_IMAGES
is set of course] before calling the tool that will consume the blobs.

Rasmus